A short advice video/transcript by Ming (Agents of Speech) advising caregivers of toddlers—especially speech-delayed children—to avoid asking many direct questions. The speaker argues that frequent question-asking creates stress, frames interactions like a quiz, and can inhibit children from feeling comfortable producing speech.
How to teach your toddler to start talking and you want to hear those sounds, hear those speech and words coming out of your child's mouth. The first thing is to refrain from question asking. You must have googled a lot. Maybe you're trying to find how to get your child to talk and you see this advice a lot. So not asking questions is actually quite important. And we talk about this a lot inside Agents of Speech. And the reason is because when you ask a lot of questions, it creates a lot of stress for the child. No matter where your child is in terms of language development, asking questions usually isn't the best way to teach your child to start talking. We use questions a lot more when your child is around, at least knowing how to answer questions. If you go up to a child who isn't talking yet and you ask a lot of questions, what you're doing is setting up your child to fail. Whether they are speech delayed or they're just typical developing children. If you ask a lot of questions, what's going to happen? They don't know the answer. They're going to go like, oh, I don't know. And at the end of the day, it's going to be very hard for them to feel comfortable talking to you because every time it feels like a quiz when they're interacting with you. So stop doing that.
